In today’s high-performance work situations, when you are busy catching up on your deadlines, finding time to connect with your colleagues is the last thing you find time for. However, interacting with your colleagues on purely a transactional basis could cause you to lose the sense of personal connection.
By finding a few minutes in your daily schedule to promote rapport at work, you can build a sense of well-being and this in turn could even help you improve your performance. But with a little planning, you could establish meaningful connections without spending too much time.
Chat during one-on-one meetings
If you have one-on-one meetings regularly, you could spend the first few minutes in the beginning to find out how they are doing before jumping onto the agenda.
Depending on the length of the meeting and the agenda, you could catch up and share your activities outside of work. Sometimes you may not have time but spend a few minutes during the beginning or end of the meetings sharing personal notes. These can even be follow-up queries on past discussions and if you are bad at remembering things you can make a note in your personal folder to keep a tab.
Encourage group sharing during meetings.
When you have team meetings and your team size is small, you could take some time monthly for updates on your team members’ activities. You could, at the start of the meeting, share some anecdotes and encourage others to follow or even ask their perceptions about some common issue that’s in everyone’s mind. This could be an event by itself when you are sharing coffee or breakfast together. Make it unstructured to encourage a sense of team engagement.
Convert breaks for informal socialising
Once or twice a week, have lunch or breakfast with your colleagues away from your work table and workstation. You can even plan this in advance to catch up with colleagues outside of your day-to-day interaction.
These forms of socialising can overcome mental fatigue and help you feel fresh for the next round of formal work.
You can take a break by walking around the office, connect with people and even share coffee with them. This moving around would get you out of the boredom of working all the time and also make time to have casual conversations with your colleagues.
Make calls during your travel time.
When you commute over long distances, some of the travel time can be used to catch up informally with your team members. This could even help you get personal perceptions about any burning issue. Use this time to get to know each other better personally and find out likes and dislikes or even find common interests.
Virtual messaging.
When you are working remotely, the chances for casual conversations would be limited and you could use the chat messages to send out short messages sharing some updates and enquiring about their well-being.
These conversations could become addictive and may stretch out eating up your work time so use this means with caution. Reaching out a few times a week for a short while could be enjoyable and help you get updated and share your thoughts.
In today’s busy work environment, it could be a major challenge to connect with your colleagues and establish a rapport. But there are plenty of benefits in getting to know your co-workers on a personal level. Find these small gaps in your time to connect with your colleagues on a personal level.
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How to Find the Time to Connect with Colleagues When You’re Very, Very Busy
by Elizabeth Grace Saunders
June 28, 2023
R2G 